I remember trying to convince a client that having multiple keyword-packed domains was useless. They bought several domains with no delimiter between keywords. stuff like: exampleproduct.com, reallybadexample.com, lamepost.com....I had to use the Saturday Night Live "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketches as teaching examples:

how does a search engine know that www.therapists.com is isn't "the rapists"?

or www.thepenismightier.com isn't....well you get the picture...

Anyway, that helped them understand a little. Although I had to stress to them that a domain name is far more useful as branding than as SEO, and if branding is the more important, go with something simple and easy to remember. In other words, something without hyphens.

I've just revamped a couple of decent sized sites using keyword rich file names, using underscores. After reading the Google Guy comment somewhere else, I have been planning to redo the lot using hyphens instead.

Jill, sounds like this would be insane in your opinion. Though I'd rather go the insane route if it has a chance of helping!

Things like that might possibly help if everything else were equal between two sites. If it's easy enough to change it, then it certainly won't hurt to do so. It's up to you to decide what you're time is worth!

Too much effort goes into buying keyword-rich domains, and it only serves to help the domain buying industry! :doh:

Jill

Hello Jill It appears from my experience having a key word in the domain name would be helpful. My Contact Us page only had two phone numbers and one address and a few alt tags, one of which was “Latin Wife”, and an email addresses with the domain Latin-Wife, nothing else.

This page was ranked in the top 3 for Latin wife in Google for months after I went life with the website. How would one explain this positioning for an almost empty page for a new site if not for the domain name referenced in the email?

I recently added some text to this page within the last three month and I see my Contact Us page dropped out for this key word and was replaced by my home page using the second domain name that I use for my site.

So if one considers you have your email address on your website would this be a convincing point for using a domain name with a key word?

Not really, you could have done the exact same thing in a file or directory name and IMO, the results would likely be the same or that's what I concluded after studying this phenomena in Google SERPs for quite some time. The domain name may have advantages in links, if you subscribe to the text around links theory, but I wouldn't advise buying or developing a second domain to do it.